Enterprise Service Management with Adam Jackson at Atlassian Team ’24 Europe

This is Textron tv. Hey everybody. Welcome back to Atlassian, team 24 here in Europe in, uh, Barcelona, Spain.

We're having a great time. I, I'm have the pleasure of being joined by Adam Jackson, by the way. That'd be a great action movie named, you wanna be a movie star someday?

You know, don't you think like Adam Jackson? I mean, They, Terminator or whatever. Yeah, I mean, when I was younger it was more the connection, the Jackson family that we used to play on, despite the fact that I'm from nowhere near America.

Um, I got a lot of that when I was younger. That's Kinda went sideways. Sorry about that.

Adams with, uh, VALIS and, uh, you're head of global, what is it? eCom, enterprise Service Management, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I am. Well, tell us about yourself and tell us about, uh, VALIS. So, I'm, I'm from, uh, Newcastle in the northeast of England.

So not, not as far travel as, as what you've had. Um, well I head up the, um, enterprise service management practice. So ultimately what we're doing is we're building solutions around the Jira service management platform.

Um, we are a truly global organization. We're a solution provider, um, for Atlassian. Um, we are one of the rare solution providers from Atlassian.

Now, all we do is Atlassian. What we focused on, um, is diversifying in terms of building partnerships with different app vendors and also, uh, onward suppliers. But ultimately Valis is, um, platinum Solution Partner.

We are specialized across, uh, JIRA, confluence, um, JIRA service management and, and cloud. Um, so what we're looking to do is obviously build innovative solutions around the Atlassian platform, um, to really take it forward in terms of that system of work approach, um, into the, the kind of future driven AI aspect of, of service management and organizational transformation. Excellent.

Uh, and you were telling me before you've been working on some compliance. Yes. We're Europe, so of course we're GDPR and Dora and whole bunch of stuff.

So much information in that team graph and all the data within Atlassian products. Yeah. Data management, data classification, data governance, have to be some important things to take care of, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So we've built a governance risk and compliance solution. Um, initially it's been focused on Dora, so for, for those who don't know, Dora is essentially, uh, an impending, um, EU financial services legislation, which, if you boil it down, comes down to five key acts and it's, it's mainly focused around, uh, business continuity and disaster recovery across SaaS platforms.

So ultimately the, the EU legislation is now analyzing how, um, organizations approach backup, um, uh, continuity disaster recovery, so BCL. And what these organizations now have to do is prove that they can, um, store their SaaS data offsite from a backup and restore capability. It's, it's relatively similar in terms of how it looks at your BCDR planning and documentation is what ISO has.

So it's nothing, it's, it's nothing groundbreaking. It's just putting another spin on financial institutions. So we know that financial data is critical to organizations and obviously that's where hackers target more and more frequently.

So we've built a solution based around, um, JIRA service management and Confluence, uh, working with our partners, high Q and land sweeper to ultimately look at how we pull data into assets, um, from that SaaS perspective. So Lancet does a, an enhanced, uh, data discovery capability. Um, KU then provides backup, uh, and, and restore capabilities.

Um, and then Jira service management essentially acts as the, the nucleus in, in the middle from an asset perspective to link out the confluence, um, to help companies with door compliance. Now are you interested in personal information, identifiable information, account numbers, those kind of things? Or what, what are you most concerned about with No, sir.

It's more SaaS data as a whole. Okay. So we don't go down any granularity Macro.

Yes. Are you, are you managing the data? Is it protected?

Can you back it up? Restore it? Yeah.

Cover Pretty much. Yeah. But it's, it's not the, the kind of granular data.

Okay. As you said, it's more of a macro level of if you've got, um, for instance, um, success factors as a, a payroll in HR tool, how is that from a functional level backed up offsite and then restored? So it's more that kind of level.

Land sweeper can do kind of more enhanced discovery, but again, they're not focused on personal data and account numbers and things like that. It's more what sort of assets do you have from a, a switch, um, kind of IT telecoms, uh, level and, and then how is that stored in assets from a, um, A-A-A-J-S-M perspective? Okay.

Are the things when, uh, when someone, I implements a product, now it's cloud-based, right? With Yep. With Atlassian.

The things about how you install, implement, set up in an organization to make sure it's easier to be compliant. Exactly. That's it.

So, so the, the, the solution we work at, work on it helps to, um, manage projects to become compliant, but then provides onward management capabilities once you are compliant, because it's not just a snapshot in time, it's gotta be continuous. So what we've built is a solution that, um, and we're working with an organization at the moment who had a a 100 strong, um, Dora compliance team. We're gonna help them to rationalize those numbers, bring them down a little bit, but not to get rid of them, but to move them in other directions so that focus on some of the more risky compliance aspects across that financial institution.

So ultimately what we're doing is we're, we're helping them to prepare by being able to see where they're up to from a compliance status perspective, um, and then helping them to manage how, how that compliance works. So I used to work in, in service assurance for a telecoms company and we had, um, ISO audits now a one week audit. I used to take about six weeks to prepare for.

So six weeks of my life was spent scrolling through data, ensuring that people had updated word documents, ensuring that SharePoint was up to date, ensuring that people were prepared and ready to have these conversations. Now, what we've built, um, again with another partner of ours called App Fire, they've built an app that allows top level view of where your documentation is up to. So that six weeks becomes a couple of hours, be exciting, see when a document was last updated, I can see what that status is, who updated it, where it's up to.

Um, and then a dashboard view of am I compliant or not across these key artifacts. And it's really simplifying. And if, if I'd had this solution when I was working in that industry, I'd have loved it.

I didn't. So that's what we're trying to do. The Solution you needed for that job.

Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.

Exactly. I've, I've solved my pain problem too late. How about in the announcements that have happened, maybe the AI features with robo, any of that particularly of interest to you?

I can imagine preparing information with AI agents gotta be helpful. Yeah. So if you think about the way that you can construct an agent, you could essentially construct a compliance agent that would sit over the top of everything that we've built and ultimately, um, tell an organization what needs to be done next so you can do an action based agent.

I mean, AI for me is, is very interesting because I'm a service management, um, person. So I look at how it can make my life more efficient. And again, it can build efficiencies into our solutions.

So we're looking at how does that GRC agent then fit into the, we haven't built it yet, but it's one of our core targets as we push our GRC compliance across, um, different industries. 'cause what we're now, now gonna do is we're gonna look at how would we build GRC for is o how would we build it for, um, SOC 2? How would we build it for other industries?

What you can then do is we'll build an agent that analyzes those frameworks and tells us what we need to do so that that AI, um, feature will help us in our r and d processes as well as, as I've said, that kind of onward management of compliance by building an agent over the top. So it's all very exciting. And add the enterprise search on top of that, just being able to get access to It Exactly Through one, one interface.

Exactly. It's a big deal. It's exciting.

Wow. Well, whatcha gonna be working on in the next six, 12 months. What's kind of in the horizon for you?

Uh, So we are focused on modular solutions. Um, so we've built an eight, sorry, an IT and an HR accelerator. We're then gonna look at how we do that for finance, payroll, et cetera, across the Atlassian stack.

We're also, as I've mentioned there before, looking at what our next compliance framework targets on. So ISO is the next big one for us. So how do we take our GRC solution, which is, um, you know, very transferrable across those, uh, legislations and build up.

So GRC is gonna be a big push for us. We're gonna do a few round tables with different financial institutions. We're gonna gonna do some webinars.

What we wanna do though, although we're in the, the business of sales, we, we, we need business. We want to provide that thought leadership on how we approach things. So we're gonna bring in different industry experts to help, um, actually educate around how the Atlassian stack can be used to help with compliance.

That's a big target of ours. It's financial institutions. It's modular focus.

It's more solutions. It's more verticals. It's building things that are already made for customers to actually use.

So we know the power of the Atlassian stack, right? Everyone does. It's very, uh, malleable.

It can be shaped in whatever we, you, you can do it, but our customers need help. They need support, they need advice, they need guidance. And that's what we're here to do.

It's not just about that cold sale, it's more how can we provide long-term transformation value for our customers based around the Atlassian stack to build solutions that can be used and deployed in different scenarios. And as I say, JRC is the big one that we can see coming. We'll look at a SecOps capabilities as well, um, and software asset management to, to, to really boost and support the great work Atlassian have done in assets.

So you look at the, the, um, additional data manager, um, for me that's a real game changer. It's something that, um, again, previous organization I worked for, um, a colleague of mine spent, um, I think it was, it was something like three working weeks trying to rationalize a hundred thousand lines worth of worth of asset data in an Excel spreadsheet. And it was because it was multiple sources coming in and it was all dealt within a spreadsheet.

If you look at what data managers now are gonna do, we're then gonna look at what solutions we can build around that capability from a software asset management perspective as well. So we've got quite a few solutions that are coming out. Um, but the big focus is how do we evangelize the benefits of all the things that Atlassian doing from a AR world perspective, the extra announcements that are coming out as well, which are quite exciting over the next few days.

Um, and really driving that solution focus and solution volume. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about it from a compliance perspective, but if you use team graph now, you know, you've got connections into all the things that are happening for each user, each, each work, each each, uh, project. But you also have, um, kind of a way to find out what's happening and build bots or build agents to go out and check compliance.

It's gotta be a pretty exciting world for you. Instead of, it's kinda like security. You're always trying to catch up compliance in the same boat a lot of times.

Yeah. Yeah. Now it can be done almost in real time.

I, I agree. I mean, you, you, you talk to some of the auditing firms as well, and one of their first activities when they're doing an audit is still to open an Excel spreadsheet. If you think about the power that you've talked about there from an AI perspective, the first activity is can you update with my, uh, compliance status?

And if you've built that agent in the right way and it's taken into account the frameworks and your ways of working and all the data that you've built within your Atlassian stack, across your system of work, you've then got an easy way to view your compliance status and then you can build those things underneath. So for us, that's gonna be one of the big powerful things that we add to our GRC solution is that compliance agent, as you've said there, it's, it's, it's really delving into the detail and, and it's not about replacing the human. What I really like about RO and the way that Atlassian talk about and how we're using it, it's all human centric.

So it comes back to the human to make that decision. We know AI is, I mean, people are, people are threatened by ai, right? But for me, it's, it's not a threat.

It's more of a benefit longer term, yes, we will see some reduction in some of the tasks we want to do, but I was just talking to a customer there before he made a great point. What he's gonna use AI for isn't to get rid of people, it's to do the things he doesn't want to do. Yeah.

And, and that's the power of it. If you can go and build that GRC agent that says, what is my compliance status? Straight away, my world of six weeks of trolling through SharePoint and Word documents becomes a click of a button to tell me what my compliance status is, to then focus on the ones that need to be updated to then roll back into my dashboards and my team view and all these things that Atlassian are building around the, um, the, the entire system of work to then shortcut my tasks.

It, I still have to do the work, but it will really enhance the way that we're, we, we, we actually, uh, use technology to, to draw us further forward. Great. Adam, it's been great talking to you, Adam Jackson with uh, Valante and, uh, have a good rest of the show.

And you too. Good luck with compliance. Thank you.

We'll be back in a bit.